On day three of my project, I worked on making the volume knobs out of the same wood I was using for the neck of the bass. I started with simple squares of wood I cut out to roughly the right size I then drilled a hole in the center and used a file to make them round. It was very difficult to make these perfect circles just using a hand file as well as making the hole concentric with the outside. I ended up cracking a few of them as I drilled the hole and had to restart. Later that night I also dried and stabilized the wood in my oven, this is supposed to keep it from warping.

On the fourth day, I worked on making the hole for the truss rod. The truss rod runs through a length of the neck and is used to adjust how straight the neck is by bending it. I used a router plane to make the channel for the truss rod to fit into, this was very very slow work using a very small blade to scrape off a small amount of wood, to make a long deep whole wasn’t the most fun or entertaining but by the end of the day I had a much better technique,

I spent the fifth day cutting out the rough shape of the neck. I first started with a coping saw with a skip tooth blade that I made which was very good at the small details but it was painfully slow. After I was around halfway through the neck I started using a Japanese pull saw instead and this greatly increased the speed at which I could cut out the neck.

On the 6th day, I started thinning down the neck with hand files and rasps to get it closer to its final dimensions this was very slow going work but it is coming along.